It's been a quietly pensive, moody day in this household. Disturbing news tends to do that to anyone. In one sense it wasn't unexpected, even while it was. A week ago an old school chum had emailed me that our mutual friend of such long standing -- a lifetime ago to the present -- had suddenly been taken to hospital; it appeared she was in renal failure. Placed on dialysis, my friend Surely said she was unable to get any more information about our friend Edith's condition.

Irving and I spent a lot of our leisure time with those two old school chums of mine and their boyfriends/husbands. Not together in a group, come to think of it, but just two couples at a time. We went places together that teenagers tend to gravitate to, and our relationship encompassed a time in our lives when we were all shaping up to be adults. We all of us married young; for us it was age 18 and by that time we had already been together for four years, Irving and I.

We had lost contact with them over the years, as they and we raised our families. They remained in Toronto and we moved to Ottawa fifty years ago. Life keeps one busy, there are so many distracting elements in life along with the imperatives. Then the oddest thing happened about ten years ago when my sister in a telephone conversation mentioned she met an old friend of ours. They both were involved in community staging of dancing events.

I gave my sister my email address (my sister is legally blind and has never used a computer) to give to Surely and in a day's time we began exchanging email messages. And then I was given Edith's address and then another mutual friend's email address. There was a lot of 'catching-up' to do. Edith's husband Alvin had passed away years earlier, and her oldest child at age eight had died in a traffic accident. She was a widow and so was my friend Surely whose husband Allan had left her with their young children while he went off with their baby-sitter never to return. Surely had married again, but by the time we re-connected she too was a widow.

Surely, Rita and Edith

A few years ago when we last went to Toronto to help settle our granddaughter living in residence at University of Toronto, we made arrangements to meet. Complicated by the fact that our meeting had to take place out of doors since we had our little elderly toy poodle with us and neither of their apartments permitted entry to pets. We four had a happy, interesting reunion. At one point Edith whispered to me she was concerned that Surely was no longer as mobile as she once was, and was preparing to shed her car.

Who might have imagined that it was Edith, the more robust of the two who would succumb first to the inevitable? My sister, younger than me by four years, commiserated with my gloomy attitude after we discovered that Edith had died several days ago. During COVID her funeral, which was yesterday, cannot have been attended by many. 

Surely, our age coeval, hasn't been out of her apartment in the last eleven months. Her daughter shops for her and just leaves the groceries at the door. My sister and her husband also live in Toronto but they venture out themselves to do the shopping weekly, as we do here. Living in tight little apartments in a city the size of metropolitan Toronto with its population size of over six million people and its relatively high incidence of COVID-19 leaves much to be desired in quality of life.

There are parks and green spaces, wooded ravines that run through the city, but access in a city of that size can be difficult and since the stay-at-home orders were promulgated on top of the lock-down a month ago, the quality of life has been even further diminished. We are quite aware of how fortunate we are to be domiciled in a smaller city of a million people, with much more green space accessible, and for us, available quite directly, giving us a much more generous quality of life; eroded somewhat with the presence of the pandemic, but tolerable.